hello hello~ i just found your blog just now and after some scrolling i can tell i will really enjoy following you.
this actually woke up within me an interesting thought and i thought maybe you wouldnt mind if i shared it? i find myself very inspired by christian/jewish mystics and hermeticists that i know due to the amount of academic,philosophical and mystical knowledge involved in those practices, and i find myself being drawn to traditional magic but (classic story nothing unique) oh gosh the heebie jebies over any mention of „the one god” are strong and not lessening. i know mysticism is all about gaining gnosis over what god means to you but born in poland = religious ickeys. i have slowly started incorporating deities into my work, and im starting to feel pleasure venerating hermes and apollo but those are productive connections with specific purposes so its not what i imagine when i think of worship.
have you known people in this situation who have eventually figured out a way to interact with this sphere of esotericism? of course i understand if my question is sudden and overtly personal for a first message haha. let me know if thats the case, otherwise im curious to hear from you!
I'm glad for the question. I think these sorts of conversations (despite how personal they can be) are incredibly important to have and discuss. I can't offer you a clear answer, but hopefully I can add a little bit to your process.
I talk a little bit about this on an upcoming episode of Luxoccult, so if you're a podcast fan keep an eye on that feed. It might be better to hear me say some of this stuff out loud. In the same breath I apologize if I repeat myself.
I went through a very similar thing. When I started to feel a pull towards the grimoires and the history of western magic I felt an incredible amount of fear. I had done so much to distance myself from that world. I had so much suffering inflicted upon me as a queer man in America by Christians and in the name of Christ. I was also someone who had worked for the church, had done ecclesiastical work. Someone who thought I had done a lot of good through that. I turned to Chaos Magic and, through that to Heathenry, to give myself an escape from that confusion. An escape from the dissonance I felt between my work and the people around me.
What purpose could there be for me, someone who was wildly queer and polyamorous and loving it, to engage with the work of dead guys whose perception of good was fundamentally tied with the virginal?
My salvation was philosophy. The realization that our ontologies are not set in stone, and that we have always found some way to disagree. That in disagreeing, in building my own framework for how this operates, I was contributing more to the tradition of western magic and the future of it than by blindly subscribing to the ontologies of my forbears.
The grimoires are prescriptive. They offer us names and seals and modes to operate. And they work as intended. They should be engaged with on their own terms and using their own methods. As best as we have the capability to. None of that means that we are the same as the people who wrote them, or have the same perspectives.
On one hand it is our obligation to know the traditions we pull from, to respect them. We have to put in the work. On the other, it is not our obligation to remain unchanging. To conservatively rest on the laurels of our predecessors.
Read up on some philosophy. Some *weird* philosophy. Check out some Neoplatonists and some Pythagoreans and some "Gnostics" (quotations for how academically fraught that word is). See their perceptions of God or the Monad and what that actually meant to them. See if the idea of God you come out the other end with is something that evens negates the ideas you had already. Sometimes the problem is semantic more than anything else.
I highly recommend the podcast The Secret History of Western Esotericism as a jumping off point for some of these philosophies. The way Eric condenses some of these ideas it can be a great jumping off point for "oh hey actually I kinda like that".
Most importantly however, break your brain a bit before you start getting hard ideas. I'm recommending starting with the philosophy NOT because I want you to have a hard ontology before diving into western magic. I want you to instead have a broader understanding of the many ways people have done and thought about this stuff. That there's no one mode of thought for approaching it.
Finally, you don't have to do any of this. Yes the story of western magic is wrapped up in the grimoires, and it will in some way inform a ton of what any of us in the west find ourselves doing anyway. And I find it, for that reason and others, important to be well-read in. But you are in no obligation to do fucking anything, for any reason. And you are under no obligation to do magic in any way other than the way you want to do it. If that ends up putting theurgy off the table? Fine, that's great. You'll be better for having tried, and for being willing to expand in the first place.
Fair warning, I went on this journey and found myself a Christian again (of a sort). I'm not upset by that. But to some of my friends who broke hard from the church that change in me was confusing and strange. We run the risk of changing no matter what we choose to engage with. As a magician, that's a risk I'm willing to take.
